The Therese Defarge school of Social evo

History for those engaged in creating it. Comprehensive activism and applied memetics.

8Th July 2005---      Memetic engineering 101 

Well, after such a long delay we start again. An first let me make sure to date the post which I failed to do before. It's the 8^th of July and I am recently back from my first rainbow gathering. It is an odd thing, having lived so long outlaw from the mainstream you can end up at a major event that for most people is a major stretch in way of interacting with the world but which to you is mainstream. I became an outlaw insurrectionist 25 years ago at the end of the Vietnam era. I live today, and for the past 5 years, in a politically oriented group house populated by people who live together sharing their struggles and joys. Our culture exists relating to each other without rules but depending instead on being able to trust each other and hear each other from a common ground. This is not very easy and even one person moving away from trust brings things down if we let it, but we have sustained our life style and continued to grow and expand. We are now moving to create more houses and our starting a cottage industry based on socially friendly, humanized production methods rather than ones that alienating a human being into a worker. That we have created something that survives and reproduce without so far becoming an institution, [ an institution being an entity of people that exists outside and with power over the personal interrelations of between those people.] is the first essential element of producing a successful super-meme [ the essential building block of an emerging human society ]. The second is that it produce a bi-product that contributes to the building of a critical mass. For us this is the increasing number of people who live anarchism as a way of life even if they know very little of the scholastic theories of anarchy discussed by those who only speculate how anarchy might work. Beyond theory we have a social technology that allows each of us to survive through mutual co-operation more successfully than each of us through such, hierarchy, power over, rules or other institutional structure that destroy human culture and creates civilization. [ In my understanding the world civilization derives from the word city. To make civil is to make something bend to facilitating the growth and maintenances of the polis, the mechanism that initially drove the state toward super meme status. As the polis gave way in prominence to mechanisms of a larger geographic area, civilization came to refer to the areas made domestic or subordinated to the political and economic institutes of the state. ] Observe the closed cycle involved, the bi-product of the meme, [ that could be stated simply as an ever accelerating increase in the number of people who have direct experience living a practical anarchist live style ] is tied directly to the success of the mechanism [ again simply stated, the individuals continue to live that live and because they see it as working for them Over the coming weeks I want to talk about the technology of designing mechanism to create a successful super-meme.

On war and mustard seeds   



preparing to write today I am playing in the background

a reading of Erich Maria Remarque's "All's quiet on

the western front". Those who promote war strip Erich

of his citicenship for this sacred witness to the

crime of war, yet I have met less than one in three

dozen pacifists who have read his words.

I have anger in my heart over this, the same anger

I felt last year when hearing the discussion over

torture inspired by Abu Graib. In the nineteen eithies

I had been confined and tortured for two years for

politcal reasons and I could recognize how meaningless

the public debate on torture had been. It is something

to which humans are often blind, you cannot have power

to stop that which you will not allow yourself to see.

Ignorance, the state of ignoring, the decision to not

know, is man's most wretched child and Charles dickens

was very wise in warning us to beware him. 

World War one was unique and important in war

because of it's location in history. Today oil has

peaked, in hardly a hundred years we have used up

resources the mother had taken millions creating. In

much the same way industrial civilization had

exhausted the conquest of undeveloped nations. Yes

thier is oil to be found, but not in the abundance to

maintain the industrial empires. Tragically the first world war

itself provided a defacto solution to the lack of virgin territory to conquor,

the war substaned the system and society florished on the blood of those

who died in so massive numbers. To place massive in

prespective understand that the most brutal

combat in human history was fought along the western

front which remained for four years in dead lock with

niether side gaining any advantage beyond the level of

of attrition by which they made the enemy suffer. To

those who fought in these horrible trenches it seemed

the war would never end. When they where wounded they

returned home to heal and then where sent back, seeing

the ignorance of the civilian population to the horror

to which it was responcible. 

Siegried Sassoon, poet and british officer who may

have inspired Strider from the "lord of the rings"

(Tolkien as well fought in the trenches of that war)

also saw with anger how civilians failed to look at

the war. He was many times over a hero, called "mad

Jack" for his near suicidal bombing raids, he grew to

understand that thier was no reason the war had ended.

From the trenches he wrote a declaration denouncing

the war and refusing to serve. While it was read in

the british parliment Sassoon was already confined to

Craiglockheart hospital for shell shock, tricked thier

by well meaning friend and fellow poet Robert Graves

so that Sassoon underwent Pyschiatric treatment rather

face a military court. Thier he meant fellow war

poet Wilfried Owen and Doctor W.H.R. Rivers. 

Rivers and others treating those whose psyche had

been smashed by the war learned many things that most

today still choose to remain ignorant of. The nearest

parallel to the conditions of these young men where to

be found in middle aged women. For ranks of captain or

below was is not about killing but surviving,

surviving in conditions which they where powerless to

change and during which they where responcible for the

lives and welfare of those even less powerful than

themselves. At Craiglockheart, Sassoon displayed an

extreme level of anger, even hatred toward civilians and

noncombatant military personel, and at the same time he 

was haunted by guilt for those men he left behind and

who he knew where contenuing to die. In the end, with

Rivers assitance, he arranged a deal with the British

military that allowed him to return to the trenches so

that the sword that was broken was again mended.

Owens also returned to the war, dying just a week before the

armastice. He was unpublished but Siegried insured his

great works, such as "Anthem for Doomed Youth" would

speak out to the world. Still it is troubling that one

would have to canvass tens of thousands of tolkien

readers to find one who has read this short poem.

I appreciate, and love, the works of Tolkein, as I

do that of Graves. It was during a bombardment of the

war that Graves felt inspired toward the mystisism that

would produce his great work on mythological

iconclasism "The White Goddess". While many would only

name Owen and Sassoon the war poet's, I would include

as well Tolkien, Graves and Remarque. Graves

understood the dire consequences of a lack of mystism

in the west. Tolkein, how hoarded gold and

industrialization inspired the war and manefested

itself in the creating of the post war world. I think though

that reading Tolkeins trilogy without reading

Remarques witness is like reading only half a book.  

You cannot seek the light by shutting out the

dark, I beleave it is in knowing the darkness that

enlightenment can be found out. 



Elizabeth Parenti Soba  

posted by: EzizabethParentiSoba at 14:42 | link | comments |

Template by motime.com  |  header image credit: Markus Gann © www.begann.de